What I Am Not This morning, rising, I stop to stare at my own naked body, breasts like two dark eyes, accusing, then quickly dress. Sometimes feeling like no more than a corpse, I beg:Look, see what you’ve done to me. I am not the same as I was. As if, in these endless dying days, there occurs nothing but a building of what I am not: something skittish-- the gray fox at dawn.

Winter Poems I. And what of this winter here? The unhappy song of rain, wind in the bay laurel; rainwater in the fountain a mixing of what is ours, and what is the earth’s. II. I go to the meadow when the snow has slowed only to see what winter has erased, witness the strangeness of so much unwelcome white beneath the firs. I remember how the body, unmarred by time, moves in the light of gray morning.

Now, we grow thicker, more unsure, our shapes changing.

The tortured soul of a poet slips away like wind through high mountain pine. III. Wondering what world you have wandered to outside of this one, I fear the void you leave behind: the silence of falling snow. I’ve grown weary. IV.

Never has the cold crept into my bones in quite this way—a chill as if I have shaken off heavy clothes and gone running naked into the water, and later felt it seep from me.

The sea in winter is a woman lying bare, shivering in the cold. The north sea has found my blood. V.

Dark muse of winter, my mercurial lover; the pale dust of frost along the roofline; lightning flickers over the Santa Lucia Mountains. In the dark bay dances the reflection of the swollen moon—I think of Li Po in the Yangtze River. VI. Selfish beyond reason, the howl of fury and wet of the storm in the night brings down the tall sequoia, and with it one hundred years, the osprey’s nest, my childhood.

This ground drinks the rain with an unknowable thirst.Bri Bruce holds a Bachelor’s degree in literature and creative writing from the UC Santa Cruz. Currently a writer, photographer, and editor, her work has appeared in over 15 anthologies, magazines, and literary publications, including The Sun Magazine, Northwind Magazine, and The Soundings Review. Most recently she was named Featured Poet of The Wayfarer Journal. Her work reflects a life amongst her native California backdrop of redwoods and Pacific shoreline. She was nominated for the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize in 2009 as a student of Santa Cruz’s first poet laureate, Gary Young. Bruce lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

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